Posts tagged SOPA

Remember that post Google put up this week that accused the MPAA of trying to resurrect the spirit of SOPA with the help of state prosecutors (that included evidence based on some of Sony Pictures' leaked emails)? It just turned into a lawsuit -- and it's already having an affect. The search giant...

Google sees itself as an unbiased index of the web, saying that it only removes results when lawmakers deem them to be illegal. Unfortunately, that's not an argument that holds much sway with the movie studios, still smarting after the heavy-handed Stop Online Piracy Act was shut down. If the New ...

In 2000 Aaron Swartz was just a terrifyingly smart 14 year-old. He was a faceless name on a mailing list, quietly contributing code and copy to RSS 1.0. Roughly twelve years later, in January of 2013, he became an unfortunate casualty in an ongoing battle that pits the government and its business ...

Political lobbying is often a mixed bag at best. Still, there's a cautious amount of optimism surrounding the Internet Association, a soon-to-start lobbying group that plans to advocate for an "open, innovative and free" internet among US politicians. The unsurprising (if well-intentioned) aim is ...

It looks like the Dark Knight Rises hysteria is affecting more than just spoiler-averse fans. Billing itself as the "internet's bat signal," the newly formed Internet Defense League is a collective of companies, websites and non-profit groups-- including the EFF, Mozilla, Reddit and WordPress -- b...

Sergey Brin wasn't too happy with how his critique of Apple and Facebook was represented in the media following an interview he gave to the Guardian. In a post on Google+ (hey, if he won't use it, who will?) Brin lamented that, "my thoughts got particularly distorted... in a way that distracts fro...

One of the qualifications for scoring a CE-Oh no 'round here is actually being a CEO -- so Sergey Brin does not receive that honor. We will, however, draw attention to what some might call his hyperbolic ramblings. In an interview with the Guardian, Google's cool uncle said he was worried about th...

Every week, just at the start of the weekend, we catch up with the WoW Insider staff and ask them, "What are you playing this week?" -- otherwise known as: WRUP. Join us to see what we're up to in and out of game, and catch us in the comments to let us know what you're playing, too!
Ladies and...

Who knew? It turns out that Anonymous is largely made up of gnomes. That's probably not a surprise to any of us who spent real time with gnomish engineering.
With all the recent talk of SOPA, PIPA, and Megaupload, the gnome members of the hacktivist community finally decided to take action. Wo...

In the face of overwhelming opposition from just about every major technology company and the general public, the US Senate and House have decided to delay votes on the anti-piracy bills known as PIPA (Senate) and SOPA (House). Majority leader Harry Reid and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith...

Mister Evil Runs for Office is an older Oxhorn video, released a little over a year ago. While the video was a general political parody at the time, it's been on my mind lately as we all consider the ramifications of SOPA.
Ostensibly, the video is about Mister Evil's doomed race to become dean...

So, who here has heard about this SOPA thing? PIPA? Anyone? I would venture a guess that most of you out there have not only heard about it, but you're violently opposed to it, as are Massively, Joystiq, and our parent company AOL. To think we're not is silly because the internet is our livelihoo...

Less than a week after announcing it would double customers broadband speeds nationwide, Virgin Media suffered a nationwide blackout that sent the network dark for most of Tuesday evening. At 5:00, the service dropped after router hardware decided it couldn't go on streaming the same episode of Th...

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
Do you like WoW Insider? Do you like WoW? Do you like the internet? Then you should be concerned about SOPA and PIPA, even...

At this point, SOPA needs no introduction. But if you've been diligently ignoring it up until this point, good luck getting through January 18th as an uninformed citizen. Google, Wikipedia and a host of other websites are either going dark or making huge, unmistakable statements on their homepages ...

Thought the White House was able to put enough of smackdown on SOPA to kill the bill entirely? You thought wrong. We'd heard that the extremely controversial legislation would be delayed until a few concerns were ironed out, and according to House Judiciary Committee Chair Lamar Smith -- the author...

Google's no stranger to privacy-related controversy, which may explain the motivation behind its latest ad campaign. On Tuesday, the company will launch a series of ads across major newspapers, magazines and billboards, as part of its new "Good to Know" initiative, designed to make the internet "a ...

It's turned out to be a big weekend for those concerned about the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act. Yesterday came word that a key House hearing originally scheduled for Wednesday will be delayed until there is a "consensus" on the bill, and today the White House has issued an official stateme...

Gamers opposed to the controversial new SOPA legislation are somewhat limited in terms of voicing their displeasure. Game companies have a bit more visibility, and Red 5 Studios is making the most of it. On January 18th, the company will temporarily shut down the beta for its highly anticipated F...

Now here's a quirky twist in the ongoing SOPA opera. Comcast has just deployed DNSSEC technology across its entire internet service, which adds an extra layer of security to websites by checking that they have a special DNS signature to prove their identity. All well and good, except that in the pro...